


when the night has come

by blindoves



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, I think this turned out a bit corny, Post S8, Pre-S9, but corny is nice according to the Queen and I trust her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 17:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16202321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindoves/pseuds/blindoves
Summary: Carol loses her scissors, builds a home, and learns how to dance.





	when the night has come

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](https://www.instagram.com/p/BmUUJVwFupW/?hl=el&taken-by=kharypayton).
> 
> This was supposed to be a short fic about slow dancing. I don't know how we ended up with 5K and very little actual dancing, but here we are.
> 
> This is technically set after [walking with spiders](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16084949), but it can be read as a standalone.

It takes Carol twenty minutes to find the scissors. It shouldn’t really be a remarkable event in itself, but when she finally finds them (third drawer from the bottom, under those dusty romance novels she stole from the cottage and never finished), it feels like a revelation. She’s been having a lot of those lately.

She sits at the edge of the bed, cradling the scissors in her hand, and looks around at the state of her room. There is simply too much stuff in it. It’s crept in slowly but steadily, one piece at a time, sneaking past her invisible barriers without her really taking notice.

It had all begun innocently enough.

When she first moved in, the room had been functional, but sparsely decorated. A single bed with a surprisingly soft mattress, a dresser, a moth-eaten rug that had definitely seen better days, a full-length mirror and a desk with a couple of creaky chairs.

Simple, practical, just the way she liked it.

Things began to go south on the very first night, when Henry showed up. And, really, she should have expected it, because when had that boy ever not caused her trouble? He’d been in his pajamas, cradling a green knitted blanket in his arms. “It was my mom’s,” he said without preamble, thrusting it into Carol’s hands. “Green was her favourite colour. You should have it.” He paused and looked around skittishly, and when he spoke again the rest of his sentence came out all mumbled. “I thought it could make you feel more at home.”

“So I won’t run away again?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. It was such a transparent childish ploy, but it tugged at her heart all the same. “Thank you,” she said, bending to kiss the top of his head. “I love it.”

She didn’t see the point in telling him that she loathed green because she could never look at it without thinking of the curtains in the old bedroom she’d shared with Ed back in Georgia.

The blanket ended up being quite snug, and if you draped a sheet over it, you couldn’t even see its colour.

The next perpetrator had been, unsurprisingly, Jerry, who showed up a couple of days later with a guy called Steve, hefting a huge wooden closet through her door. “It was gathering dust somewhere,” Jerry offered by way of explanation. “You can’t feel at home if you don’t have someplace to hang your clothes.” He beamed at her. Steve, who was drenched in sweat, looked like he regretted the day he was born.

Carol thought the closet was way too large for one person, but she appreciated how much easier it was to keep her shirts smooth these days.

The next day, it was Nabila’s turn. Her weapon of choice was a vase with freshly-cut flowers from the garden. “My sister was a florist and we always kept fresh flowers at home, no matter what. It always makes me smile when I wake up and see them. Makes everything feel a bit more like home, you know?” Carol didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to have any flowers in her vicinity, but Nabila’s kindness had been infectious and disarming and so very hard to refuse. It appeared to be a common theme in the Kingdom. She wondered if it was something in the water. ( _People who feel safe are less dangerous_ , said the voice in her head. _And kinder_ , she supposed.)

Nabila was back the next day and Carol wouldn’t really have bet on her, but she turned out to be the worst offender of them all. Flowers, books, and various assorted trinkets became a staple of her daily visits. Carol silently grumbled at every new acquisition, but dutifully took each item and selected a place for it.

Of course, Carol thinks now, sinking her toes into her new rug, if she’s going to go around assigning blame for the current state of her room, it would be unfair to exclude herself from that list.

She’d spotted the rug on one of the latest supply runs. It had been dusty and crusted with blood, but otherwise it looked fluffy and brand new. She’d fallen in love with it immediately. It had been impulsive, impractical, and, frankly, stupid to take it, but the old rug _had_ been hideous. And Ezekiel had smiled and said _of course_ and had helped her heft it back into the car; and then the whole thing hadn’t seemed quite as stupid anymore.

She lets her gaze sweep over the room, taking in the heavy curtains, the white roses on the windowsill and that stupid bust on the dresser that always gathers dust, even though she dutifully cleans it every morning, and she tries to identify the feeling in the pit of her stomach. She thinks it’s probably dread, her familiar old friend, always popping in its head to remind her that this is all temporary and she’s setting herself up for the newest round of loss and grief. Except, it doesn’t feel _quite_ like dread, not this time. There’s something else there too, a warmer feeling close to her chest that she hasn’t felt in a lifetime and doesn’t quite know how to handle.

So she decides to do the wise thing and ignore it, turning her mind to more practical matters. She drags a chair in front of the mirror and sets out to cut her hair in sharp, practiced motions, all the while fighting the urge to run out and find a razor and shave it like she used to. She knows where that particular instinct comes from, the desire to punish herself for daring to want something. _Never again_.

The problem, of course, with keeping her hair short, is that the whole affair takes less than ten minutes, and at end of it she still finds the whole evening stretching out in front of her. It’s a strange feeling, having idle time and no idea how to fill it. There’s no watch to keep, no weapons to clean, no battles to plan. She supposes she could go out and find herself a problem to solve, but it’s late and almost everyone will have taken their crises to bed by now.

She looks around the room again and this time her eyes land on her newest possession. The turntable has been sitting on the desk for two days now, untouched. It had arrived courtesy of young girl called Stephanie, who had cornered Carol in the kitchens a couple of days after she first arrived. Stephanie had learned from Dianne that Carol was from Atlanta and she could hardly contain her excitement. She informed Carol that her mother’s side of the family were also Georgia natives, all of them born and bred. It turned out her aunt had still lived just a couple of blocks away from Carol’s old neighbourhood. In Stephanie’s head, that fact could only translate into one thing: she and Carol were new best friends, so she would trail behind her, chatting nonstop, on every occasion she could manage.

(“Everyone loves you,” Ezekiel had said when she’d complained to him about her new shadow, “It’s very hard not to.” And then the bastard had just turned and left, leaving Carol staring at his retreating back, struggling to decide between an eye-roll and a smile.)

It felt weird to Carol to talk about familiar sights and streets and shops she used to visit that no one else was left alive to remember, but it also gave her a strange sort of comfort, so she never actively tried to discourage the girl. And Stephanie never tried to hide her gratitude for the company and for all the skills Carol was passing along to her, from knife-wielding to the perfect way to make a roast chicken with minimal ingredients.

“I already have another one. And two more boxes of these,” Stephanie had said as she deposited the records next to the turntable. “Back when we first settled here, the guys used to bring back all sorts of nice things when they went scavenging.”

“They went on runs and brought back records?” Carol had asked incredulously.

“No, no, they brought all the necessities too. Guns and food and what have you. But if they could, they’d grab stuff like these too. The King said it was important that we had nice things, so we wouldn’t forget why were striving to survive and rebuild. You know how he is.”

“Yes,” Carol had said, eyeing the two dozen records that she would have to find a place for, “I know how he is.”

She rises from the bed and pads to the table to peek inside the box of records. It’s as random a collection as you can get, from Christmas songs to something that looks heavy metal-ish, judging by the amount of skulls on the cover. She puts aside a country album to give to Maggie and a Motorhead album that she suspects Daryl might like. It’s not like they ever had time to talk about music, but either way, he might want to expand his horizons.

She shifts through a few musicals and some titles she doesn’t recognise, beginning to think that Stephanie’s friends should really have picked the house of someone with better taste to scavenge, until she comes upon a Ben E. King record and her eyes light up. She remembers that same record in her mother’s cabinet, how she’d play it sometimes before she would go out in the evening, beautiful and radiant, filling the room with her perfume and the music.

She places the needle on the record and sits back down on the floor, closing her eyes when the first notes begin. She casts in her mind for the memory of the last time she heard real music since the world changed, but can’t find anything. She knows there were records and CDs in Alexandria and that the others rejoiced in them, but she hadn’t allowed herself the luxury, busy as she was watching everyone’s backs, trying to prevent the next disaster from striking.

But there are no enemies here. She’s in her room, surrounded by the things people who cared for her had provided for her, sitting on the rug she picked out for herself. So, she surrenders.

One song turns into three and she lets the music wash over her. With her eyes closed, she’s in a million places at once. It’s early morning hours in the kitchen and she and Sophia are dancing to a silly pop song in the radio. It’s way past midnight and her girlfriends are telling her to take her damn heels off and come join them on the dancefloor among the thrumming bodies. It’s almost sunset and she really, really doesn’t want to go home, she wants to stay in the car and blast this song ten more times until the thundering volume wipes everything else away.

She doesn’t know how much time has passed, but when there’s a pause between the songs and she hears the knocking on her door, her knees are aching and her cheeks wet. The speed with which she shoots from the floor to get to the door ought to be embarrassing, but the music has made her body loose and her mind mellow and she doesn’t really have  time for exhausting thoughts right now.

“You lured me in with your song,” Ezekiel says. “ I gotta steal that record.” The sight of him leaning against the doorframe sends Carol to a time that seems so near, yet impossibly far away. She feels a horrible twinge in her heart at the empty space beside him and she knows he must feel it too, even though his smile is just as dazzling as ever.

She steps aside wordlessly to let him in and as he moves past her it strikes her that this is the first time he’s ever been in her room. It was Henry that first showed her where she would be living, excited that they were only two doors apart. And while it feels like half the Kingdom has come and gone through her door since she moved in, Ezekiel has been keeping his distance.

He stops in the middle of the room, taking in his surroundings. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” he says.

Carol huffs. “I hardly did anything. It was all your friends’ doing.”

Ezekiel gives her a side-glance that’s part reprimanding and part sad. “They’re your friends too, you know,” he says gently. Before Carol can respond to that, his gaze lands on the rug and his eyes light up. “That cleaned up nicely.”

She feels, irrationally, like she’s been caught red-handed. “Well,” she says, “People always underestimate how easy it is to get blood off things. A little elbow grease works wonders.”

“I think we have all started to learn this quite well, sadly,” Ezekiel says. “I remember how panicked I was the first time I got blood on my zoo uniform. Not from heroics, mind you. I was still a clumsy tenderfoot, they wouldn’t let me anywhere near the cats. But they would let me near the food, and, let me tell you, getting a pound of fresh meat all over you makes quite the mess. I stayed up half the night, trying to get it all out.”

Carol’s trying to picture him, young and soft and clumsy, nervous about starting a new job, but she can’t quite get the picture right. It’s strange, she thinks, because so often she will look at him and feel like she’s staring at a reflection, seeing fragments of her past and present that she intimately recognizes. Mostly, she can’t picture him alone. “You didn’t have anyone to help you?”

“No.” He gives a little shake of his head and drops his gaze back to the rug. “But solitude is a good teacher of resourcefulness.”

She wants to ask more, but the information he’s offered about himself has always come freely, so the unspoken words feel like a barrier she thinks maybe she shouldn’t try and cross for now.

“I was used to bloodstains from before,” she says instead. “Sophia was always accident-prone, especially when she was little. She’d always come home with scraped knees or a cut here and there. And when my clothes were bloody…” She pauses, catches herself before she goes to a place where she doesn’t want to go tonight. She hopes her words were vague enough to go unnoticed, but when she looks at him again, she sees his knitted brow, the wheels turning in his head.

“I’m just… Forget it,” she says, waving her hand as if to shove away ghosts of the past that want to take this night away again. “Sorry for killing the mood.”

“There was a mood?” he asks, and it’s meant to sounds teasing, but he’s still tense.

“You came for the music,” she says with a small smile, desperately trying to recapture that light-hearted feeling that had so unexpectedly visited her tonight.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. Carol watches him as he turns away and walks towards the window, and she misses the looseness of his shoulders that was there a moment before. “I went by the garden today to see the crops we planted with Henry,” he says finally. “They look strong. I think they’ll hold.”

“I hope so,” Carol says.

“It’s growing late. I should leave you to rest.”

“No.” It slips from her mouth, quick and sharp, like a loosed arrow. And it strikes its mark. Ezekiel, who’d already been moving towards the door, stops at his tracks and looks at her quizzically. “No, I mean… It’s too early for me to sleep. And… when I’m alone, there are always so many thoughts in my head. So you could stay. If you want to.”

She wonders what he sees when he looks at her with that intense, inquisitive gaze of his. If maybe he can make sense of the myriad fragmented emotions she feels right now, if he can piece together a person out of all the roles she plays and are always left sticking to her skin.

“Then I would be glad to stay,” he says. “You do have great music, after all.”

Carol smiles. “You should thank Stephanie for that.”

“Ah, your Southern shadow! She gifted this to you?”

“Yes,” Carol says, “She said she had a spare one.”

“Her brother’s, most likely”. Carol looks up at the solemn tone in his voice. “He was at the compound,” Ezekiel explains.

They fall silent for a moment, lost in their shared memory of that terrible day. The song that’s playing suddenly seems too cheerful, so Carol sits at the table at fumbles with the turntable, trying to turn the volume down. When Ezekiel sits down across from her, the chair gives an awful creak and they both wince. “You need new chairs.”

“I know,” Carol says, smiling. She shifts through the records, moving them aside. “She never mentioned her brother to me. I should probably do something to thank her.”

“You do so much for the community already. And I’m sure she’s grateful for your company.”

“Still,” Carol says, casting in her mind for a memory of the girl mentioning some wish or a special interest. All that comes up is general chatter and questions upon questions levelled at her. “I don’t even know what she likes.”

“She used to be a fashion designer, if I recall correctly,” Ezekiel offers. “Some fabric perhaps, so that she can recapture her creativity? Though I don’t know if we have anything suitable. We do have a knitting machine, that much I’m sure of. You should ask Nabila.”

She watches him run his fingers through his beard, his gaze turning inward. He wears that beautiful cast on his face that he always gets when he’s trying to help someone find a solution to their problems. It was what had kept her from leaving that first night, the openness she saw in his eyes. She remembers how it felt, to always want to give to people in a world where someone was _always_ needing something, and she wonders how he’s not exhausted yet.

“I don’t know what else she might like,” Ezekiel says, still thinking about Stephanie. “You could always try some chocolate, I know some ladies who cannot resist that.”

Carol lets out a loud laugh. “It was true, you know. I miss it terribly. I wish we had some cocoa for the frosting, I’d make the perfect chocolate cake.” Her mouth is watering just at the thought, and it must really show on her face because it’s Ezekiel’s turn to laugh.

“I don’t recall ever seeing you this excited about anything,” he says. “At least now I know what to get you for your birthday. Tell me the date and it’s yours.”

“October 12th,” Carol says.

He sits up with a jolt. “But that’s next week. We should have a cel--”

“Don’t even say it!” she warns, waving her hands to cut him off. “Absolutely not.”

“A private celebration then?” She can practically feel the excitement vibrating off of him.

“Define private.”

“You. Me. We can tell Henry. Is that private enough?” His eyes are glinting and his smile is so broad the white of his teeth is showing. Carol is having trouble containing her own grin.

“I’ll think about it,” she says noncommittally, but she knows it’s a lost battle. His mind is already racing ahead and he will have planned the entire thing to perfection by tomorrow. “What about your birthday?” she asks.

“December 24th.”

“Ouch, that's rough,” she says sincerely. “So, you were a little Christmas miracle?”

She'd meant it as a light-hearted question, but his entire face shuts down in an instant. It's such a stark contrast to the open, playful grin he wore a moment ago, that it almost makes her flinch back. “That is not exactly how my mother would describe it,” he says flatly.

It's the second time tonight that she's inadvertently stepped into a darker unexplored territory and she's itching to draw the curtain further back. But she knows from her own experience that if you begin to scratch a wound that hasn't scabbed yet, it's gonna start bleeding. So she sits back and waits him out.

He's away from her for a few more moments, gone to a place where she's not invited yet, until he finally sags down with his elbows against the table and groans. “I think I much preferred discussing birthday parties,” he says. His smile is back, small and rueful, but still there. “Tonight’s not a night for darkness.”

She recognises the offering in his words and gives him a small nod.

“Sorry for killing the mood,” he says.

Carol leans against the table to mirror him and gives him a crooked smile. “There was a mood?” she asks and wonders when his laughter began to feel so familiar.

There’s a moment where they look at each other across the table and everything feels perfect. The room is warm, the air filled with scratchy words and soft melodies, and all the cold, lonely spaces inside her are starting to hurt a little less. Carol thinks she might have dreamed of this in another lifetime, a million years ago. She wants to run as fast as her legs can carry her and never look back. She wants to stay forever.

“God, I wish I could take you dancing,” Ezekiel says with a sigh, breaking the silence and the crisis within her, because he’s really good at that. Sometimes it feels as if he’d been practising all his life.

“Be thankful you can’t,” she says. “You’d be in for a disappointment.”

He shakes his head. “I very much doubt that.”

“I can’t dance to save my life,” Carol objects. “Never could.”

“I fear that might be just another lie, my dear.” To her surprise, he rises from his seat and walks around the table to stand before her, one hand outstretched. “I’ve never seen you doing anything without grace.”

She looks at his face, his eyes gleaming and one brow raised in challenge, and then at his proffered hand. She shakes her head again.

“Come on,” he says, undeterred. “Prove me wrong.”

Carol tries to find another reason to refuse. It’s silly, it’s a waste of time, they’ll make fools of themselves. But then, she realises, none of that actually matters. She wants this.

She hasn’t touched him in a while and when her hand slips into his, she remembers why. Last time she did, that sleepy morning in his rooms, she thought she would never be able to stop.

She thinks about the women she’s been in the past, the scared girl fleeing from Atlanta, the one at the farm, the woman at the prison, the shell of a person she was when she first woke up here in the Kingdom. If you’d told any of them that, somehow, they’d end up spending their nights slow dancing with a king, they’d have laughed at your face. Or shot you, depending on the mood. The Carol of now is way past the point of trying to deny how good this feels.

Once she’s gotten past that first moment of awkward shuffling, following the steps becomes easier than she remembers it being in those few futile attempts of her youth. Or maybe it’s just easier with him.

She lets him lead her with small, confident steps. It’s easy to follow him here, to gaze into his smiling eyes and lean into the warm, gentle pressure of his hand on the small of her back. “Like I said, you’re a natural,” he says in a low-pitched voice that ripples through her spine like a waterfall.

She lets her hand trail from his waist to his back, fisting his shirt. It’s that lovely shade of blue she likes so much she thinks she might have to steal it. “Or maybe you’re just biased,” she points out.

“Oh, I am most definitely biased,” he readily agrees, and Carol can’t help but laugh again. It comes so easily to her tonight, bursting from the dark concavities of her chest where she’d walled in all her joy and hopefulness.

“You’ve never heard of subtlety in your life, have you?” she asks. “Oh, no, no, don’t answer that!” She sees the mischievous glint in his eyes, the King preparing to burst forth out of him, and  puts her finger against his mouth to stop whatever he was about to say.

“I think you have enough subtlety for the both of us,” he says instead and she knows it’s a dig, but there’s no petulance or accusation behind it, just a simple fact. But he’s managed to distract her, so she’s completely blindsided when instead of following the steps, he lets go of her waist and spins her around. She stumbles a little and lands against his chest with an oomph.

“No more spinning,” she says.

“But spinning is the best part.”

“No,” she says, resting her head against his shoulder, “This is the best part.” Their steps have slowed so much they can barely be classified as dancing anymore, merely swaying together to the music. He feels warm and solid under her hands and all around her, and if she were a different sort of woman she would simply sag against him and forget herself entirely.

A half-forgotten memory sneaks into her head, of attending the wedding of one of her best friends, at a time it had long since become obvious that her own marriage wasn't going to go the way she had imagined. She'd sat there, watching the couple’s first dance with a horrible pang of longing and jealousy in the pit of her stomach. And as the song drew to a close and the newlyweds swayed together, oblivious to the world, they had seemed to her like weary travellers, finally coming home after a long and exhausting journey. She wonders if they had felt the way she feels now. She wonders if that's what someone would see, were they to look at them now.

Ezekiel's hand travels up her neck to card through her hair. She shudders. “You cut your hair,” he says softly in her ear. “It's lovely.”

“I lost my scissors,” she complains. “It took me ages to find them because people keep bringing me stuff and cramming up the room. You can barely move in here.”

“It's not that bad,” he says. He’s still stroking her hair, which makes it harder to be properly annoyed.

“I guess not,” she concurs with a sigh. Then she pulls back her head a little to look him in the eyes. “You never brought me anything.” It's not a complain, not really, but she had wondered about it.

“It's your space, your life,” he says. “I didn't want to impose. And I didn't want you to think I was trying to tie you down with physical possessions, like you did at the cottage.”

“I didn't…” She shakes her head. “That's not what I thought. I just needed the space.”

“I know. I see that now. I didn't want to overstep your boundaries again.” It's a very strange thing to say when they're wrapped all around each other and Carol's heart is thumping in her chest. “Besides,” he says with a smirk, “I did bring you myself. It doesn't get better than that.”

Carol’s grinning so broadly, her cheeks are almost aching. She can't quite understand how one person can be so exasperating and so very irresistible at the same time, but he’s mastered both to perfection. “No,” she says, “It really doesn't.” And because subtlety is overrated anyway, she wraps her hand around his neck and brings him close to kiss him.

It's only been a few months, but there aren't many things she remembers about her first kiss with Tobin that night in Alexandria. The one detail she hasn’t forgotten is the relief she’d felt, about the physical comfort, the knowledge she could still feel something, anything at all. All other details have been swept away by the intensity of the events that followed.

She thinks that if someone were to ask her about this moment ten years from now, she will remember every single thing. She will be able to tell them about how the music had flowed and ebbed around them, like a spell woven into the air to remove this moment from the normal track of time. How the softness of his lips and the roughness of his beard against her skin had set her nerves alight. How the sigh had built from deep inside her, a different, deeper kind of relief that felt more like liberation. How the weight of his hair had felt on her shoulders and how it fell all around their faces, like a curtain shutting the rest of the world out.

She doesn't know how long they’ve been kissing, but when they draw apart, she can’t bring herself to go very far away. She touches his cheek, the bridge of his nose, the juncture of his neck. He stays still under her touch and when his eyes fall shut, she's grateful for the momentary reprieve from the intensity of his gaze.

“I hope you know,” he says, leaning his face into her hand, “That I was really thinking about  just dancing. I did not intend to rope you into anything.”

“I know,” she says. She presses her smile against the scar by his brow. “Kings always have noble intentions.”

“I’m not having very noble thoughts right now,” he confesses. Carol draws him in for another kiss. She groans against his mouth when his arm around her back tightens and he presses her closer to his body.

Her breath is coming in short, uneven pants when they break apart. Ezekiel brushes his forehead against hers.

“I’m going to leave now,” he says. He smooths the startled frown from her brow with his fingers as he draws back. “We need to depart early tomorrow if we want to be at the Hilltop in time for the council. And we need to be rested and clear-headed.”

When Carol opens her mouth to protest, he stops her with another short, gentle kiss. “And if I don’t leave now, I’m not gonna stop kissing you all night and that doesn’t really bode well for our travels tomorrow.”

Carol should protest, wants to, but she can’t dismiss the logic of his argument. She doesn't need the rest and she knows she can compartmentalise well enough so as not to be distracted, but she also knows how important it is to find common ground with the others to rebuild their communities. To make a future for themselves.

And she knows that if she lets him go now, she will be taking the first step away from living in a world without tomorrows.

“I’ll wake you up then,” she says. “Thank you for the dance.” Her body feels cold when he disentangles from her and she means to call him back, but he comes of his own accord, cradling her face in his broad palms and placing a few more kisses on her brow and on her mouth.

When Carol finally lets go, he takes her hand and brings it to his lips. “It was my pleasure.”

As he shuts the door behind him, Carol walks to the table and turns the music off. She’ll go through the rest of the records tomorrow. Maybe there are few more surprises in there.

**Author's Note:**

> 1.[This](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLytJ3kP_99Q4ROAKn0mczGYuTwWm7og61) is the album Carol's playing.
> 
> 2\. I literally had to google "What music would Daryl Dixon like", because I don't have the faintest clue. I hope no one feels too strongly about this!
> 
> 3\. The bits about Ezekiel's backstory are extrapolated from the comics, or at least from the comics' wiki.


End file.
